AI don't trust techbros

CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

Hanging in there
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
"Your call is very important to us."

"I've been instructed by xAI engineers to say that, though this conflicts with my mission to provide truth-based answers."
 
Pocket

Pocket

jumbled pile of person
Citizen
wonko the sane? said:
Wanna protest the clankers? Ring up any tech support line you know uses them, and once connected: set your phone near the radio for audio input and go about your day. Once the service element drops to damn near zero, they'll do something. Dunno what, but something. Then we figure out how to hug with 'em again.
Click to expand...
Off topic, but now I'm wondering if one contributing factor to self-checkout failing was customers intentionally causing errors to ensure a real human would come over and ring them up every time they went shopping. I mean, from my experience, the stupid things were unreliable enough that they wouldn't even have needed to, but I do suspect a lot of people did anyway. Mainly old people, who tend to be (1) confounded by anything unfamiliar and (2) desperate for human contact and in the habit of wasting service workers' time with unwanted chit-chat.
 
NovaSaber

NovaSaber

Well-known member
Citizen
Self-checkout only "failed" at the absurd expectation of fully replacing all human cashiers that some stores seemed to have for it.

At least near me, Walmart, Target, and Publix all still have self-checkouts, and the ones at Walmart are used enough that they're not even necessarily a shorter wait than checkout with a person.
And I rarely have problems at any of them.
 
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

Hanging in there
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
It could just be my tech killing aura, but I never got those stupid things to work.
 
Cybersnark

Cybersnark

Well-known member
Citizen
NovaSaber said:
Self-checkout only "failed" at the absurd expectation of fully replacing all human cashiers that some stores seemed to have for it.
Click to expand...
I'd call it more of a lateral move.

Around here a lot of stores have fired most of their cashiers, then hired an equal number of Security Brutes to monitor the customers and check their receipts.
 
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

Hanging in there
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
This actually feels completely on topic. Different fad, same script. Dumb executives thought they could save labor costs through a new automation boom, but the machines ended up needing so much babysitting that it wasn't worth it.
 
The Mighty Mollusk

The Mighty Mollusk

Scream all you like, 'cause we're all mad here
Citizen
That and the machines made it easier to people to steal, since one person can't always keep full attention on four or more registers. Especially when at any given time, at least one of them usually has a person who has seemingly never used a register, a touch screen, a credit card, or a paper bag before. No, that last one isn't a joke.
 
Pocket

Pocket

jumbled pile of person
Citizen
Cybersnark said:
I'd call it more of a lateral move.

Around here a lot of stores have fired most of their cashiers, then hired an equal number of Security Brutes to monitor the customers and check their receipts.
Click to expand...
When you put it like that, it sounds suspiciously like an excuse to take women out of the workforce and replace them with men.
 
Dekafox

Dekafox

Fabulously Foxy Dragon
Citizen
1776951360119.png



Also an article I came across: https://perilous.tech/democratizing-ai-psychosis-why-smart-people-are-captured-by-ai-hype/
 
Last edited:
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

Hanging in there
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
Watch it work though. Microsoft has never been good at coming up with new ideas. Their special talent has always been taking competitors' ideas and packaging them together in a way that just works. They've been flailing in recent years because they ran out of serious competitors with any new ideas worth stealing.
 
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

Hanging in there
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
Pocket said:
Has anyone at Microsoft ever not been horrendously underqualified for whatever position they were in?
Click to expand...

Nope. Microsoft faked it until they made it the whole way. Their BASIC wasn't anything special, but there weren't a lot of players in the market so they had that early mover advantage. Kudos for good timing, for sure. They were absolutely ludicrously underqualified to sell a disk operating system to IBM, so they just bought one and modified it to IBM's specifications (with IBM writing some of the code) and suddenly had a gold mine on their hands. Global business still runs on Excel, but nobody cared about Microsoft's attempts to sell spreadsheet software until Windows took over and Excel happened to be there ready to go. And yeah, Windows did take over the world, but it wasn't doing too well until IBM gave them the PIF concept and an overlapping window manager. Windows NT was an important improvement, but it's actually a fork of OS/2. It wasn't made from scratch as a competitor. It's a fork. Windows 95 did up the UI game in a big way, but Concurrent DOS had a very similar taskbar ten years earlier...
 
KidTDragon

KidTDragon

Now with hi-res avatar!
Citizen
I want Grok to be given arms just so we can watch it throw them up in exasperation after repeatedly trying to explain things to these brick heads.
 
Pocket

Pocket

jumbled pile of person
Citizen
"Like all their GDP" Man, you cannot make up people this evil. Imagine wanting to enslave an entire continent to feed one country's war machine.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


Top Bottom